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Mr. Aron Ra was born in Kingman, Arizona. He was baptised as a Mormon. He is the ex-President of Atheist Alliance of America. He is a public speaker, secular activist, and an advocate for reason in education. He hosts the Ra-Men podcast with Dan Arel and Mark Nebo of BeSecular. Here we talk about religion from the vantage of a prominent atheist.
When Ra and I talked back in May of 2017 for Conatus News, Ra emphasized the situation in arguments with him. His life is marked by continual, non-stop debating with theists as an atheist. He is not the norm, but atheists do tend to debate.
For Ra, the nature of the debate format takes on a more informal flavor with him. Because of the nature of his ways in which to talk, discuss, and converse with believers of various formal and non-formal religions.
He, in the context of the personal predicament, explained, “When you’re talking to someone who, like me, knows both sides of the argument, when you start talking to someone like this about why they don’t believe, you have to make a choice whether to remain honest or whether to remain creationist, because it is no longer possible to be both.”
This means the renunciation of the creationist claims as fallacious or the creation of falsehoods to defend the faith. It amounts to a choice. Some will choose one path. Others will choose another by implication of Ra’s logic.
“There was a movie that came out a couple of years back I happen to have been in, which was in called ‘My Week in Atheism.’ It was made by a Christian named John Christy who was only pretending to be an atheist for a week,” Ra stated.
The person in the film travels to an atheist conference. He makes an analogy to what happens at the conference trip for the movie as to what happens in the churches. Described how people seem to see an even presentation with everyone on equal sides.
But there is the person at the end, who is purportedly not a plant. That person then proclaims how their mind has not been changed at all. Even going so far as to say, that their faith is even stronger now after the interaction with the atheist.
Ra takes this as a completely false front. He exclaimed, “This is pretend! That was the game in the first place! That it doesn’t matter what anybody says. You’re going to continue to believe. This is what I bring up in my book. If you look up any of the leading creationist organisations – creation.com, Creation Moments, Answers in Genesis, Institute for Creation Research.”
These organizations have a statement of faith. The basic purpose of the statement of faith, according to Ra, is the prevention of critical thinking about the articles of faith. In short, it provides the basis for not having to question fundamental beliefs. One’s at odds with the vast majority of the practicing biologists, for example.
Ra related, “One of them put it that ‘wherever science and the Bible conflict, the science is wrong. The Bible is right.’ Another one says, ‘Whether it is archaeology, history, or any fact at all. If it refutes the Bible, it can’t. The Bible is always right.’”
Based on the personal narrative of Ra, this becomes the life experience for him. He related the debate viewed millions of times. The one between Bill Nye and Ken Ham. Bill Nye known as a science educator. Ken Ham known as a creationist educator.
“The leading apologetic debater makes the same argument. That whenever there is an obvious conflict between theology and science that science is wrong,” Ra stated, “It is like Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis said when they asked him and Bill Nye, ‘What would it take to change your mind?’ Bill Nye said, ‘Evidence.’ Ken Ham said, ‘Nothing.’ He’s going to believe what he wants to believe no matter what.”
The basis of the disagreement between fundamentalist beliefs and Ra’s atheism split there, deviate at that point. On the one, the respect of empirical information to inform, piece by piece, the framework for comprehension of the world.
On the other, the use of revelation and inspired writing in the purported word of God in the Bible as the foundation for knowledge of the world and then the empirical information will become conformed to the pre-existing, extant pattern of the text.
Hence, evidence changes one mind; revelation informs and conforms another.
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Image Credits: Pixabay